Seriously, someone approved this guy? Read his profile. His first post will be SPAM for certain. Look at his name and homepage. I thought someone manually inspected all new accounts for approval. The Capcha is easily defeated by an actual person. Then they can allow the bot to start posting after a certain amount of time, or perhaps several real posts. Then BOOM and we are up to our hips in SPAM again, like before.

He is listed in today's birthday announcements at the bottom of the page.

Thanks, let me take this opportunity to explain how you get an account approved

Anyone (yes even spammers) get register for an account. They then get emailed a link to activate the account (this knocks out 90% of spammers right there that use fake email accounts or never check the accounts they do use)

Once you have your account activated, you can then only see one forum, the new user forum. This is a place where every person has to write an intelligent "essay" where they give information on their background, their instrument, and anything else they feel is important. It's pretty easy to see who the real tuba /euphonium players are. The spammers don't even try, they just post their viagra ads and call it a day. I delete those accounts as soon as they post. The ones that convince me they know how to read the rules and can write an intelligent paragraph get their accounts approved and they are free to proceed to the rest of the group

So yes, there are probably a lot of spammy type users that actually log in, but that doesn't mean they can post in the full forum

Ah, did not know they could *only* participate in the New User forum, which none of us can see and therefore forget it exists. That works well. He has been back since he opened his account, but he has not posted. Probably this is because he knows he can't until he posts something tuba-like in the NU forum. Nice! Thanks, Mark!

Mark Finley wrote:The system works well, but twice in the last two years a spammer has gotten through. Nobody approved the account, they just appeared and started posting. I guess there was a glitch in the matrix.

Matrix Meme.jpg (6.66 KiB) Viewed 182 times

Oh, by the way: we don't type on typewriters anymore. We don't double-space after periods.

Seriously, I am not trying to be a smart-ass. My first stepfather and my mom owned a print shop. I helped set it up and was their first typesetter while I was waiting for my professional qualifications to be graded and approved. And yes, I have always read quickly. For example, one day of my professional test is based on answering multiple choice questions, but the fact setup for each question is almost a full column long, three columns to a page. Two sessions for that day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Three hours each. Many applicants do not finish. The morning session I finished in 2:45, and the afternoon session I finished in 2:30 and was allowed to turn in my materials and leave early. So yes, I do read more quickly and smoothly than most people. Oh, yes, I passed. With a very high score.

Back to the print shop: we never double spaced after a period, because we used real typefaces, not typewriter courier or what passes for Times New Roman. I was also an editor of sorts, and was in charge of making sure everything was absolutely readable and legible, whatever the project, from business cards to books. Much of our repeat business was because of this quality. So my opinion is based on the years of helping out in a real hands-on-every-day-rubber-meets-the-road experience instead of a contrived "study" quoted above. I stand by my opinion. And as you can tell, unless Mark edits it, everything in this post is single-spaced.

Epilogue: it is absolutely dreadful that of all the thousands of type faces, this study chose the WORST legible typeface possible. So anything that by its inherent nature detracts from readability may, by the nature of the typeface, need a tad more space between certain letters or certain punctuation marks so a person can actually read the wretched document. So the issue is really much more complex than simply a 1- or 2-space discussion. For example, here are the twelve most recommended typefaces by LinkedIn for resume writing. Notice that Courier, whether original Courier, American Typewriter, or the bastard "New" Courier used in the "study," is NOT listed: https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/desi ... for-print- . Note also the article discusses the appropriate spacing between letters, what we call "leading." It is not a matter of 1- or 2-spacings, it is dependent on the typeface. As an aside, I have been a fan of the Stone family of typefaces, one of which is mentioned in this list, for legibility, readability and smoothness, since it came out over thirty years ago.

One last item for clarity and proper nomenclature: the style of the letters collectively is known as the "typeface." The variations on the theme, such as size, bold, italic, etc., are the "fonts." So the proper way to say it is: "John composed the document using Times New Roman typeface set in 12-point regular weight font."

We were getting 30 or more posts in the new user forum from pornography spammers, so I asked Farah and Sean if we could tighten the controls even more, and this what Farah came up with

Password protected the new user forum. The password question is in the title of the forum, and it's an easy question, in fact it's the same one that is "supposed" to be a spam blocker upon registration. That safe guard doesn't work, but new users don't have access to the new user forum until they answer the question a second time. 99% don't even try to answer that question when they register, so it should be a nice little wall

2nd, we've blocked the ability of anyone to see any other posts in that group except for the threads that they them self started. So if a slammer does start a post in there before I can delete it, we don't have to worry about a new user seeing a bunch of dorn links in the group